Douglas McLennan
Doug is the editor of ArtsJournal
Antilogic And The Ancient Art Of Suspending Judgment
Antilogic was a form of contradiction that caused a person to simultaneously believe opposite things about a single event or phenomenon, without any way...
18 Shows Are Opening On Broadway This Spring. Too Many?
The density of late-season openings — 11 plays and musicals over a nine-day stretch in late April — has producers and investors worried about...
Why The Village Voice Worked
People showed up straight from college, because working at the Voice had always been their dream, despite substandard wages and word rates, paltry expense budgets, and...
Could The NY Times Win Its Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI?
Unlike Google’s search engine, generative AI models sometimes do produce creative works that compete directly with the works they were trained on. And this puts these...
The State Of Today’s Culture
The fastest growing sector of the culture economy is distraction. Or call it scrolling or swiping or wasting time or whatever you want. But it’s...
Broadway’s Big Presidents Day Box Office Boost
The Presidents Day Weekend was like a little Christmas gift for Broadway, with grosses for the 23 productions posting a hefty 27% increase over...
A Staggering $100M Canadian Art Fraud
A decades-long forgery scheme ensnared Canada’s most famous Indigenous artist, a rock musician turned sleuth and several top museums. - Smithsonian
Bellevue Arts Museum Declares A Crisis, Says It Might Have To Close
“We’re at the place where the straw breaks the camel’s back,” Kate Scher said. She called the crisis a “combined product” of the museum’s lack...
How AI Is Changing Music
AI is already changing how musicians compose and play music in ways hard to imagine only a few years ago, opening up new horizons...
The Systematic Destruction Of Gaza’s Buildings
Since October 7 2023, the bombardment of Gaza is reported to have damaged more than 100 historic sites and destroyed 69,700 homes. - The Conversation
Pro-Palestine Protestors Take Over MoMA
MoMA had shut down completely. It would not reopen until the following day. Visitors were ferried to the exits. Outside, a soft-spoken museum employee...
Ways Of Looking At Art
In a YouGov survey released in 2023, nearly half of Americans said they didn’t consider themselves artistic. At 58 percent, even more respondents said they weren’t...
Debunking Reasons For Looking At Art
Art, I have preached, is for bildung, self-development, especially within the context of an undergraduate education. Art helps you to become a deeper, freer...
Alonzo King: Attaching Dance To The World
That prospect of dance having a life and an urgency beyond an arrangement of steps has fueled King’s path as a dancer and a...
The Web As We Know It Is About To Change
Seeking information using a search engine could be almost completely replaced by this new generation of large language model-powered systems. - The Wall Street...
Book Bans Are Bad Enough. Stripping Libraries Of Funding Is A Whole Other Bad
While the nation has been focusing on book bans, school libraries all around us have gone without enough (noncontroversial) books. Or inviting furniture. Or amenities that would help...
Will A Show Of Chuck Close’s Final Work Help Restore His Place In Art?
Arne Glimcher said the controversy surrounding Close is not his concern. “There has been too much about Chuck that isn’t about the art,” he...
100 Years Later “Rhapsody In Blue” Is Still Riling Up Debate
Rhapsody in Blue opened up a wider set of debates about the relationship between “high art” and popular art, about racism and cultural differences, about...
America’s Prisons See Opera As A Security Threat
Prison authorities see a threat to security in a staggering array of literature, art and music. Connecticut has banned 334 individual books, magazines and...
The New York Times Unique Argument In Its Copyright Case Against AI Companies
It argues that as a reputable and trusted source, its articles have additional weight and reliability in training generative AI and are part of...
Comcast And Paramount Talk About Combining Peacock And Paramount+ Into A Package
Along with making access to the two platforms comparatively cheaper than buying separate subscriptions, the partnership would help Comcast and Paramount “produce significant cost...
So Who’s Winning In The Artists-Versus-AI-Companies Copyright Lawsuit?
U.S. copyright law is extremely complicated, and the technology bears features that don’t resemble anything seen in earlier technology transitions. Put them together, and...
AI And The End Of Websites
”In the future, a company’s AI agent—basically the AI version of that company—will be just as important as their website,” says Taylor. “It's going...
AI Is Letting Us Read Ancient Scrolls At Herculaneum For The First Time
The news that we could finally read these still rolled-up papyri hit me like a lightning bolt. In the past, opening the scrolls, even...
Does Perfection Have To Be The Measure Of Ballet?
Is it possible to imagine the ballet world without a primary teleology of aesthetic perfectionism and a baseline of low self-worth? Is it possible...